Kaia Reddick
6 stories published
Stories by Kaia Reddick
Forest of Echoed Promises
The forest whispers everything it has heard. Anyone who makes a promise beneath its canopy hears it repeated whenever leaves stir. Lovers vow forever; the trees murmur "forever" with every breeze and storm. Children swear to never tell; cicadas chant...
Museum of Almosts
The Museum of Almosts opens without fanfare in a converted warehouse. Inside, exhibits display choices not taken. A sign reads, "Touch nothing; imagine everything." In one room, a door labeled "Graduate School" stands ajar, showing a desk covered in...
The Sleep Tithe
City council passes a law: every citizen must tithe one dream per week to the State Dream Bank. Dreams fuel public works, powering streetlights and buses. People line up at kiosks, pressing foreheads to glass, exhaling dreams into vials. At first, it...
The Archivist of Fading Languages
Eleni collected sounds the way others collected stamps. Her office at the Institute for Lingual Preservation was a tangle of reels, drives, and battered notebooks filled with phonetic scribbles. When a language dwindled to single digits of speakers, she was dispatched like a paramedic, arriving with...
The Lanternfish City
Deep in a trench where sunlight never reached, a city shimmered. Lanternfish had built it, unknowingly, by congregating in patterns generation after generation. Their bioluminescence lit caverns, guided currents, and formed highways of light. Scientists dropped cameras, catching glimpses of glowing...
The Insurance Against Miracles
Miracles, like electronics, sometimes failed. A prayer for rain yielded frogs. A statue wept oil instead of tears. To protect believers and practitioners, the Mutual Assurance of Miraculous Events (MAME) offered policies. Pay a premium, file a claim if your miracle misfired. Adjusters would investig...